Category: Q&A

Bow Garden Club invites you into the garden

Master Gardener Joyce Kimball is the Publicity Chair and former president of the Bow Garden Club and a former president and current executive board member of The New Hampshire Federation of Garden Clubs. Bow Garden Club maintains 10 “beauty spots,” such as the town gazebo. They generally hold meetings on the second Monday of every month at 6 p.m. starting again on Monday, Sept. 9, with an educational program by Advanced Gardener Ron Trexler from UNH Cooperative Extension, who will speak on preparing gardens for winter. People are encouraged to stop by a meeting to see if they are interested in joining. Kimball spoke about the Bow Garden Club and some end-of-summer garden tips. Visit bowgardenclub.org.

How did the Bow Garden Club get started with the New Hampshire Federation of Garden Clubs?

It’s kind of a nice little story. It was three women from Bow that were just sitting around talking about plants and flowers and they decided to start a garden club. I’m not quite sure, because that was back in 1964, a little before my time, I was alive but I wasn’t part of a club. It was 1964 and it just kind of went from there. They joined the state garden club, which is called New Hampshire Federation of Garden Clubs, Inc., which is a consortium of like 18 to 20, I think right now, area garden clubs across the state.

What is the New Hampshire Federation of Garden Clubs?

Every state in the country has a federated garden club and we’re under the umbrella of the national garden club. We have regional and national, so we get out there as far as covering anyone that’s at all interested in plants or anything green. Some people are vegetable gardeners but most are floral gardeners, or both…. We act as ambassadors from the state garden club to go out to the local garden clubs to make them aware of benefits … like learning how to do floral arranging, that kind of thing, things that are available to them through the state organization and sometimes even the national organization. So just a way for people with like minds and interests to get together…

Who can join the Bow Garden Club?

One club may include five or six towns. It all depends on how big they are. Bow, for instance, has 70 members, which is a lot for our size town. Most of them are from Bow. But we also have someone from Manchester, somebody from Derry chose to join us because we’re one of the few that have evening meetings. We have somebody from Pembroke, Concord, and I think that may be it right now. Oh, actually we have one from Australia because our president just went to Australia and she is staying as a member. So we really branch out.

What are a few garden tips for this time of year?

Because [plants have] grown so fast with the heat and the extra water … I would advise people to cut them back. There’s still plenty of time to let them reflower. If they’re looking kind of leggy, as we call them, with long stems, or if the blossoms have gone by you should cut those off anyways to encourage new stems. It’s a little too soon to start cleaning the garden, that shouldn’t happen till October, or as we call it, ‘putting the garden to bed,’ so to speak. That’s when you cut them all down to the ground, but way too early for that. .

What can one expect at a garden club meeting?

Don’t worry about eating because we call it the Food and Garden Club because we can cook as well as we can garden. We have one of our committees, the refreshment committee, people are assigned a certain meeting to come up with a theme and provide the refreshments. I think people come for the food as much as anything else. We don’t meet during July and August, we do other things, we have a ‘Cocktails in the Garden’ we did recently…. We have an educational program at every meeting that starts at 6:30 and usually goes for like an hour.

—Zachary Lewis

Featured image: Courtesy photo.

owner of Glimpse Gallery

Meme Exum is the owner of Glimpse Gallery in Concord, whose mission is to uplift artists in the community. The gallery holds six shows a year with six artists for each show. Curator Christina Landry-Boullion shows her art in each exhibition as well. The current exhibition, which runs until Sept. 9, has its last reception on Saturday, Aug. 24, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. Glimpse Gallery asks that those interested in attending RSVP through their website. Visit theglimpsegallery.com.

Explain your job and what it entails.

I own and run a small fine art gallery in downtown Concord, New Hampshire. I scour Concord, and ultimately New Hampshire, [for artists] who are looking to get their name and their artwork out to the public. I’m not a traditional gallery, I don’t have constricting contracts or commission structure. All day I’m constantly on the phone and doing email…. The best part is viewing all this incredible new art.

How long have you had this job?

I’ve had it in tandem with other jobs, whether you equate that to a side hustle or the one I had the longest, for 12 years.

What led you to this career field and your current job?

I love art. … I want to be immersed in an arena where I’m constantly seeing cool, new art, and this is the best way to do it. I have a leader personality so I don’t mind doing the admin and the business structure of it….

What kind of education or training did you need?

I have a college degree in political science with a minor in international affairs and ultimately hard-life experience was what taught me everything I know now to run the gallery. Everything from my stint waiting tables to doing administrative work to my marketing career for high-end architecture.

What is your typical at-work uniform or attire?

Fabulous dresses and heels. My outfits are my art. …. It’s super fun, energetic, accessible….

What is the most challenging thing about your work, and how do you deal with it?

Keeping up with correspondence, and I try to approach it with humility because I always want to answer and I want to give timely responses and answers to people that are really being vulnerable by presenting me with their art.

What do you wish you had known at the beginning of your career?

That time is more valuable than money.

What do you wish other people knew about your job?

That humility is an important facet…. I am learning every day…

What was your first job?

Working at a consignment shop for women’s clothing in Atlanta, Georgia. On the weekends I also did Baskin-Robbins, so it was a twofer.

What is the best piece of work-related advice you’ve ever received?

It would go back to the Baskin-Robbins job and Mr. Hauk [the manager] telling me to focus and listen … that’s the best piece of advice.

—Zachary Lewis

Five favorites
Favorite book: Sapiens by Yuval Harari. It is such an incredible book.
Favorite movie: The Fisher King with Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges.
Favorite music: Hans Zimmer. He does those incredible movie scores.
Favorite food: Popcorn cooked in a pan (not microwave popcorn).
Favorite thing about NH: The wildlife. I’m very geared toward nature. I’ll brake for snakes in the road.

Featured photo: Meme Exum. Courtesy photo.

Rose Mountain Rumble ride benefits land conservation

Chirs Wells is the President and Executive Director of the Piscataquog Land Conservancy (PLC). The PLC is a private nonprofit land conservation organization that works to conserve the natural resources and scenic beauty of the Piscataquog, Souhegan and Nashua River valleys of southern New Hampshire. The Rose Mountain Rumble that takes place on Saturday, Aug. 24, is their annual “gravel ride” that helps raise funds for the PLC and awareness about land conservation. Registration is full but there is a waitlist. Visit plcnh.org for more information about the organization and rosemountainrumble.com for information about the gravel ride.

What is the Rose Mountain Rumble?

What people that are into it call a quote ‘gravel ride’ or a ‘gravel grinder.’ It’s in between, essentially, road biking and mountain biking. People are mostly riding bicycles that are a tweaked version of a road bike but they’re a little bit beefier, they’ve got a little bit different gearing, a little bit wider tires, and what they’re really made for, yes, you can ride them on pavement for sure, but their sweet spot is to be riding on dirt woods or woods road kind of environment. It’s turned into a real culture and a real scene. One of our organizers, Kris Henry, always likes to stress that this is not a race, this is a ride. The whole point of it is to get people on the back roads, dirt roads of south central New Hampshire, which is the area that we work in, to get out and experience these lightly traveled dirt roads, beautiful scenery, and be with a community of people.

How did the gravel ride get started?

We got started with this ride back in 2014…. It’s our 10th year since the first one but we missed one from Covid, so this is actually officially the ninth annual, so take your pick, it’s either the ninth or the 10th. The first year we had all of 30 people ride in it. We went from 30 to within a couple years we’re at 150 and have been ever since. We capped it intentionally to have it not be too big. Anyway, back in 2014 our organization was working on a land conservation project to conserve basically the whole top of Rose Mountain. It’s sort of a 2,000-footish small mountain in Lyndeborough and we had this opportunity to acquire the property and had to raise a decent amount of money to do it. At the time, somebody who was a longtime friend of the organization said, ‘Here’s an idea, maybe you could do a bike thing or something, you should talk to these people I know in Lyndeborough.’ Those people turned out to be a guy named Kris Henry who’s basically a custom bike builder … and then a couple, Doug Powers and his wife, Doria Harris, they are both avid cyclists…. We literally got together at Kris Henry’s bike building shop, his backyard of his house in Lyndeborough, and pretty quickly came up with the idea of doing a gravel ride in the area and whatever money we could spin off of it would benefit this land conservation area.

Can you expand on what the PLC does?

The PLC is a private, nonprofit land conservation organization; some people will shorten that to being ‘a land trust.’ We are the local land trust, basically, for greater Manchester, greater Nashua, 26 towns altogether. Just about all of them are in Hillsborough County; we have a couple that are in Merrimack. It’s a really diverse area. We’ve been around since 1970. As of today we hold land for conservation easements on … about 9,600 acres. Basically, what we do, we work on a purely voluntary basis with land owners that are interested in conserving their property or looking to sell their property to whoever but we know it’s of conservation value. Some of the lands and easements are straight up donations, some of them we’re paying full market value based on appraisal, and honestly sort of everything in between. The whole point of it is to conserve the property in an undeveloped state in perpetuity, i.e. forever. Once the land is protected, whether it’s through a conservation easement, which is essentially you’re taking the development rights off of a property but it remains in private or town ownership, or something that we own, either way we are then responsible forevermore to be monitoring that property at least annually to make sure that the boundaries are being respected, nothing bad is going on, and that the natural resource values are being protected on an ongoing basis. On some of the properties we own we have trail systems that we are maintaining and in some cases adding to. We’re trying to make some of our properties, where it’s appropriate, to be local recreational areas for people…. All of our lands are open to the public, that is lands we own outright. All of them are open to some level of recreation. Most of them are open to hunting and fishing to people that are into it. We try to have them open to as many activities as is reasonable and safe.

What’s the best way for someone to support PLC’s mission?

It’s kind of the classic answer from a nonprofit organization. One obvious and good way, and we definitely always need people to help us out, is to be a member. Make a contribution, be a member in the organization, support us financially. And/or, it doesn’t have to be one or the other, volunteer. We definitely need volunteers, especially for our property monitoring. We’ve got 80-plus people in any given year that are volunteer land monitors and they are often the people who are out there annually being our eyes and ears on the ground to check on these properties as we go along.

—Zachary Lewis

Featured image: Rose Mountain Rumble. Photo by Gabriella Nissen.

Owner of Macdaddy Guitars

Christian Macdonald, owner of Macdaddy Guitars in Weare, thinks of guitars as “beautiful three-dimensional sculptures.” His guitars can be found on his MacDaddy Guitars Facebook page as well as at select local dealers.

Explain your job and what it entails.

My job now is building guitars full-time, basically working in my home shop. I build acoustic-electric hollow-body designed guitars that I’ve designed. I use all solid woods, mostly from the area, locally sourced if I can.

How long have you had this job?

Well, that’s a long story but officially I started in 2003, working part-time at my business-slash-hobby at the time, and then it wasn’t until 2019 that I decided to leave the office world behind and just jump into this full-time.

What led you to this career field and your current job?

I’ve always, since I was a young kid, dabbled with my brother’s guitar and banjo … I built my first guitar back in 1981 I think it was. A solid body, kind of like a Fender Strat kit, and I really loved it…. I wanted to get more adventurous and build a hollow-body guitar … Just sort of evolved from there and I just fell in love with the whole process, the making of them, and it kind of became an obsession.

What kind of education or training did you need?

I went to college and got a B.A. in communications and one in fine arts. I was trained as a two-dimensional artist, a painter … I had to really be self-taught, the guitar-making part of it. I never had formal training as a guitar-maker.

What is your typical at-work uniform or attire?

It depends on what time of year it is, but right now it’s a T-shirt and shorts. I like my Crocs with socks. I also wear my Macdaddy work apron to keep stuff off of my clothes and there’s a lot of things like earmuffs and dust masks and goggles on top of what I wear.

What is the most challenging thing about your work, and how do you deal with it?

I think for me the most challenging thing is to be a self-motivator and -promoter. I mean the most challenging aspect of making a product and selling it is the marketing.

What do you wish other people knew about your job?

I wish they knew how much work is actually entailed. It’s such a multi-step job … From cutting raw wood to putting all the pieces together and then doing all the finishing and the setting up.

What was your first job?

My first job was at a little Italian restaurant in Connecticut…. I was a dishwasher and a food prepper and I made $1.25 an hour.

What is the best piece of work-related advice you’ve ever received?

I was at a conference for business and a person, I don’t think this is an actual quote, but I wrote it down, [said,] ‘When you find that passion that drives you, work it for all it’s worth knowing what you don’t want to do.’

—Zachary Lewis

Five favorites
Favorite book: Night Fall by Nelson DeMille
Favorite movie: Definitely Jaws
Favorite music: Lately I really love Amos Lee.
Favorite food: All things cheesy. Cheese of any kind.
Favorite thing about NH: I guess, metaphorically speaking, I can breathe easier here in New Hampshire, it just always feels like home.

Featured photo: Christian Macdonald. Courtesy photo.